(Thanks Giannis Kadoglou and Mike Loades!) A French archaeological expedition in Oman, on the Arabian Peninsula, has announced the discovery of a group of miniature weapons, including bows and quivers made of solid bronze, on the floor of what is thought to be a religious complex.
The article dates the weapons to "Iron Age II (900-600 BC)" or approximately the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Elamite periods and roughly contemporaneous to the canonical Luristan bronzes. However, author Mike Loades has opined that the arrows and quivers bear a strong resemblance to those seen on the famous Achaemenid friezes from Susa. No closeups of the "five daggers with crescent-shaped pommels" is included but the description obviously sounds like daggers from the Levant, Mesopotamia and western Iran from the late Bronze Age through (as we now know) early Achaemenid times. I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with the type of axehead shown in the article.
Showing posts with label axe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label axe. Show all posts
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Monday, February 29, 2016
Deve Hüyük - the full catalogue
Following Friday's post, I found Roger Moorey's catalogue of finds. It was embarrassingly easy and I don't know why my earlier searches didn't turn it up, but here goes anyway. Although most of what's shown is in the form of line drawings, it's still a rich gallery of objects common to our time period.
An important note on time periods: The site as a whole comprises several phases. Deve Hüyük I seems to be Neo-Assyrian, while Deve Hüyük II is Achaemenid. There's also a few Arsacid-period graves in phase II; these are termed Deve Hüyük III. Therefore if you're interested in any particular object, you need to confirm which phase it belongs to.
Moorey states, on the basis of the long sword and hilt fragments from Persepolis (see OIP #69), that the flanged dagger was used throughout the Achaemenid period. He also lends some credence to something I've long suspected, that this dagger is the same as the "Elamite" dagger worn by robe-clad Persians and Elamites in period art.
There's a lot of highly decorated pottery, including several "flasks" shaped like pointed amphorae but without handles. A canteen broadly similar to the ones from Persepolis but slightly different in detail is here described as a "pilgrim flask," while another, highly decorated glazed one is considered to be of Egyptian influence.
Those looking to add more flare to high-class impressions may look to the variety of bronze bracelets, anklets, rings and earrings, many of which should be simple to fabricate from metal rod or strips with annealing and filing. Beads of all sorts of materials appear, as well as small, ceramic human head and animal pendants.
Among toiletries are a pair of tweezers, several circular bronze mirrors, and tubes and applicator sticks for kohl, a kind of eyeliner. The kohl tubes and sticks are not necessarily feminine accessories, as Xenophon claims that Astyages, like other Median men, wore "pencillings beneath his eyes." (Some of the attached codes may clarify this but I'm only skimming for the time being.)
Achaemenid bronze bowls, rhytons, iron akinakai, sagarides, arrowheads, tanged javelin heads, a second gorytos cover decoration, snaffle bits, arm fibulae and cylinder seals mostly reinforce what we already know. One socketed trilobate arrowhead is attached to a bronze chain for some reason, and most of the spearheads run to proportionally rather narrow, though they may have corroded at the edges. There's also a bronze bell described as a horse fitting.
An important note on time periods: The site as a whole comprises several phases. Deve Hüyük I seems to be Neo-Assyrian, while Deve Hüyük II is Achaemenid. There's also a few Arsacid-period graves in phase II; these are termed Deve Hüyük III. Therefore if you're interested in any particular object, you need to confirm which phase it belongs to.
Moorey states, on the basis of the long sword and hilt fragments from Persepolis (see OIP #69), that the flanged dagger was used throughout the Achaemenid period. He also lends some credence to something I've long suspected, that this dagger is the same as the "Elamite" dagger worn by robe-clad Persians and Elamites in period art.
There's a lot of highly decorated pottery, including several "flasks" shaped like pointed amphorae but without handles. A canteen broadly similar to the ones from Persepolis but slightly different in detail is here described as a "pilgrim flask," while another, highly decorated glazed one is considered to be of Egyptian influence.
Those looking to add more flare to high-class impressions may look to the variety of bronze bracelets, anklets, rings and earrings, many of which should be simple to fabricate from metal rod or strips with annealing and filing. Beads of all sorts of materials appear, as well as small, ceramic human head and animal pendants.
Among toiletries are a pair of tweezers, several circular bronze mirrors, and tubes and applicator sticks for kohl, a kind of eyeliner. The kohl tubes and sticks are not necessarily feminine accessories, as Xenophon claims that Astyages, like other Median men, wore "pencillings beneath his eyes." (Some of the attached codes may clarify this but I'm only skimming for the time being.)
Achaemenid bronze bowls, rhytons, iron akinakai, sagarides, arrowheads, tanged javelin heads, a second gorytos cover decoration, snaffle bits, arm fibulae and cylinder seals mostly reinforce what we already know. One socketed trilobate arrowhead is attached to a bronze chain for some reason, and most of the spearheads run to proportionally rather narrow, though they may have corroded at the edges. There's also a bronze bell described as a horse fitting.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Peoples of the empire: The Egyptians, part 2
Nectanebo II secured his throne with the help of the famous Spartan king Agesilaus II, and when Agesilaus died of illness on his way home, the pharaoh paid him the honor of having his body royally embalmed. Nectanebo's reign was characterized by the building and restoration of even more temples. When the Persians tried to invade again in 351, he repelled them via Greek mercenaries under Lamias of Sparta and Diophantes of Athens. When Artaxerxes III began assembling a naval force at Sidon, Nectanebo encouraged the Sidonians to revolt and sent Greek mercenaries under the famous Mentor of Rhodes to help them. The rebellion began to spread through Phoenicia and Cyprus, before finally being put down in or around 346.
Artaxerxes took Mentor (who had defected), Bagoas and an imperial army into the Nile Delta in 343, and Nectanebo first tried to hold Memphis, then Thebes, and finally to Nubia, where he died a year or two later. Egypt was now returned to Achaemenid hands. Greek sources allege that Artaxerxes desecrated temples and killed the Apis bull, as Cambyses had done, though Lendering throws doubt on such rash behavior.
Although the Egyptians resented Persian rule, it appears that Egyptians were still taken into the imperial army, as a stele records how the noble Somtutefnekhet of Heracleopolis (Hwt-nen-nesu) fought at and survived the Battle of Issus. The last two Achaemenid satraps are recorded in (Latinized) Greek as Sabaces, who died at Issus, and Mazaces, his successor. As Sabaces' garrison accompanied him to Issus, Mazaces was left with no army and was forced to hand over Egypt to Alexander the Great without a fight when he arrived in 332.
Alexander was received warmly in Egypt. At the Oracle of Amun in the Siwa Oasis, he was declared the son of Amun (Zeus-Ammon) and rightful pharaoh of Egypt. It was after this that he began to openly speak of himself as having divine lineage and his portraits to include horns alluding to the ram that symbolized Amun. Alexander founded Alexandria (modern Iskandariyah) and appointed Cleomenes of Naucratis as nomarch of Egypt's Arabian district and collector of the country's taxes.
With Alexander's death in 323, Perdiccas, regent of the infant Alexander IV, appointed Macedonian general Ptolemy as satrap of Egypt. Cleomenes was retained as his deputy, but Ptolemy executed him on suspicion of spying for Perdiccas. In 321, Perdiccas tried to bring Ptolemy to heel with an invasion, but was defeated on the Nile and assassinated by frustrated officers including Seleucus. Ptolemy held Egypt throughout the Wars of the Diadochi, establishing the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt, which remained independent until falling to the Romans under Octavian Caesar in 30 BC.
For more than six centuries Egypt remained in Roman hands. For a few years, the Sassanid Persians wrested control from the Eastern Roman empire, then lost it again, and then in 641 the country fell to the first Muslim caliphate. Thereafter, Egypt underwent a process of Arabization, though still recognized as the selfsame historical region of the pharaohs. A series of native dynasties interspersed with foreign occupation ended with the Revolution of 1952, when army officers under Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser established the current republic.
Language
Egyptian was an Afroasiatic language. It is thus distantly related to the Semitic, Cushitic and many other subfamilies in the area, but, like Greek in the Indo-European family, formed its own branch. The phase of the language used in Achaemenid times was Early Demotic Egyptian, which also refers to its writing system, a consonantal alphabet. The Early Demotic script was used for administrative and commercial purposes while literature and religious texts were written in older scripts (hieroglyphs and hieratic).
From around the turn of the 5th century, the writing system entered the Middle Demotic phase, while the spoken language moved on, evolving into something a bit closer to Coptic. Coptic itself gradually gave way to Arabic after the Islamic Conquest in the 7th century, but hung on as a daily language for some even after the Middle Ages. Today it's mostly restricted to liturgical use among the Christian Copts.
Religion
Due to its long history, Egyptian polytheism had had plenty of time to develop and change. As it stood in the late period, the wind god of Thebes, Amun, had long since merged wtih the sun god Re or Ra and assumed the role of supreme god. Other major deities included Maat, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Ptah, and Bes, who was popularly worshipped on Cyprus.
The Egyptian kingship, like the Persian, rested on a principle encompassing order, truth, righteousness and the universal binding force. However, unlike aša or arta, Maat could also be personified as a goddess who personally judged the dead. Both king and commoner had to uphold maat through proper behavior, including charity and maintaining tradition. Impiousness and injustice could upset the natural order and cause misfortune. Upholders of maat would be rewarded in the afterlife. Thus the Egyptian statue of Darius the Great declares in hieroglyphs that the king is "the perfect god who rejoices in maat," along with Persian cuneiform expressing his accustomed veneration of Ahura Mazda.
The struggle of maat versus isfet (evil and untruth) is expressed via the myth of Osiris, the ancient god-king and lifeforce of the land, who was killed by his brother and usurper Set, god of chaos. In the late period, Set was portrayed negatively though still worshipped in certain religious centers. He was said to have cut Osiris' body into 42 pieces and scattered them around the country, their landing places corresponding with the 42 nomes. Thus the resurrection of Osiris by his wife Isis (earlier regarded as the wife of the sky god Horus, now reidentified as his mother) is tied to the unification of Egypt. Horus became the next king, and Isis' association with the throne (the literal meaning of her name, is.t) may mean that the throne was metaphorically regarded as the king's mother.
Although the pharaoh retained a kind of divine status (to my knowledge, it is only in Egyptian-language documents that the Achaemenids claimed divinity rather than mere divine favor) his role as intercessor between gods and humanity became less important as direct personal devotions on the part of commoners became more so. The gods were now seen as less distant, more involved in day-to-day human affairs, and individuals sought out divine favor on their own. Concurrent is the spread of funerary texts like the Book of the Dead among commoners to ensure that they, like the king, would be protected and guided in the afterlife.
Clothing
The Egyptian at Naqš-e Rostam is clad simply in an ankle-length tunic with long fitted sleeves and a keyhole neckline, worn unbelted (in my estimation it would probably be bloused over a belt for combat, like the ancient Gaels, who wore a similar tunic). Unfortunately, the Persepolis relief is badly damaged, showing only the Egyptians' lower legs, though they also wear garments with a long hem; a wide embroidered border (or perhaps a fringe) is also visible. The sculpture, or at least the quality and lighting of the photo, is too indistinct even to tell what kind of footwear they have. As for women's clothing, Fashion-Era has a guide on wrapping a shawl-type dress Egyptian-style from a rectangular length of fabric. Ancient Egypt was famed for its production of linen and this is therefore an even more appropriate fabric here than for peoples from elsewhere in the empire, but wool is also fine. Cotton was not yet grown in Egypt and would have to be regarded as an imported luxury good from India.
Weapons
Herodotus lists Egyptian arms as "woven helmets," "hollow shields with broad rims, and spears for sea-warfare, and great battle-axes. Most of them wore cuirasses and carried long swords (machairas)."
The woven helmets may have very ancient precedent. Headgear resembling woven rope helmets are said to be worn in paintings in the tomb of Ramses III. However it's equally true that over the centuries between then and the Graeco-Persian wars there is likely to have been changes in style and technology.
The Cyropaedia (VI.2 and VII.1) describes Egyptian shields as very large, covering the body down to the feet, being pushed forward with one shoulder, and used with very large spears. New Kingdom Egyptian troops had often been portrayed carrying shields with flat bottoms, arched tops and blotchy patterns perhaps indicating that they were covered in hair-on animal hide, and these late period shields are likely an enlargement of those. If equipped with a telamon they could be used in conjunction with large spears in the same manner as early Mycenaean warriors.
Swords were quite long by 5th century standards, straight, made of iron and with U-shaped pommels. A few fragments may be seen here. If Persian art is to be trusted, the Egyptians and many other peoples wore long sword scabbards on slings like rifles, rather than belts or baldrics.
Egyptian cuirasses are believed to have been made of linen; Herodotus mentions that Amasis sent such a one to a temple of Athena on Rhodes. Although you can still find a lot of sources claiming that linen armor was glued, the people whom I trust most on this (such as Dan Howard, author of Bronze Age Military Equipment) have said unequivocally that linen armor should be quilted, not glued.
A footnote: Yes, it really is pure coincidence that the "Peoples of the empire" series reached Egypt just as Egypt is dominating international news. It's things like this that are why I'm not 100 percent atheist.
Artaxerxes took Mentor (who had defected), Bagoas and an imperial army into the Nile Delta in 343, and Nectanebo first tried to hold Memphis, then Thebes, and finally to Nubia, where he died a year or two later. Egypt was now returned to Achaemenid hands. Greek sources allege that Artaxerxes desecrated temples and killed the Apis bull, as Cambyses had done, though Lendering throws doubt on such rash behavior.
Although the Egyptians resented Persian rule, it appears that Egyptians were still taken into the imperial army, as a stele records how the noble Somtutefnekhet of Heracleopolis (Hwt-nen-nesu) fought at and survived the Battle of Issus. The last two Achaemenid satraps are recorded in (Latinized) Greek as Sabaces, who died at Issus, and Mazaces, his successor. As Sabaces' garrison accompanied him to Issus, Mazaces was left with no army and was forced to hand over Egypt to Alexander the Great without a fight when he arrived in 332.
Alexander was received warmly in Egypt. At the Oracle of Amun in the Siwa Oasis, he was declared the son of Amun (Zeus-Ammon) and rightful pharaoh of Egypt. It was after this that he began to openly speak of himself as having divine lineage and his portraits to include horns alluding to the ram that symbolized Amun. Alexander founded Alexandria (modern Iskandariyah) and appointed Cleomenes of Naucratis as nomarch of Egypt's Arabian district and collector of the country's taxes.
With Alexander's death in 323, Perdiccas, regent of the infant Alexander IV, appointed Macedonian general Ptolemy as satrap of Egypt. Cleomenes was retained as his deputy, but Ptolemy executed him on suspicion of spying for Perdiccas. In 321, Perdiccas tried to bring Ptolemy to heel with an invasion, but was defeated on the Nile and assassinated by frustrated officers including Seleucus. Ptolemy held Egypt throughout the Wars of the Diadochi, establishing the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt, which remained independent until falling to the Romans under Octavian Caesar in 30 BC.
For more than six centuries Egypt remained in Roman hands. For a few years, the Sassanid Persians wrested control from the Eastern Roman empire, then lost it again, and then in 641 the country fell to the first Muslim caliphate. Thereafter, Egypt underwent a process of Arabization, though still recognized as the selfsame historical region of the pharaohs. A series of native dynasties interspersed with foreign occupation ended with the Revolution of 1952, when army officers under Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser established the current republic.
Language
Egyptian was an Afroasiatic language. It is thus distantly related to the Semitic, Cushitic and many other subfamilies in the area, but, like Greek in the Indo-European family, formed its own branch. The phase of the language used in Achaemenid times was Early Demotic Egyptian, which also refers to its writing system, a consonantal alphabet. The Early Demotic script was used for administrative and commercial purposes while literature and religious texts were written in older scripts (hieroglyphs and hieratic).
From around the turn of the 5th century, the writing system entered the Middle Demotic phase, while the spoken language moved on, evolving into something a bit closer to Coptic. Coptic itself gradually gave way to Arabic after the Islamic Conquest in the 7th century, but hung on as a daily language for some even after the Middle Ages. Today it's mostly restricted to liturgical use among the Christian Copts.
Religion
Due to its long history, Egyptian polytheism had had plenty of time to develop and change. As it stood in the late period, the wind god of Thebes, Amun, had long since merged wtih the sun god Re or Ra and assumed the role of supreme god. Other major deities included Maat, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Ptah, and Bes, who was popularly worshipped on Cyprus.
The Egyptian kingship, like the Persian, rested on a principle encompassing order, truth, righteousness and the universal binding force. However, unlike aša or arta, Maat could also be personified as a goddess who personally judged the dead. Both king and commoner had to uphold maat through proper behavior, including charity and maintaining tradition. Impiousness and injustice could upset the natural order and cause misfortune. Upholders of maat would be rewarded in the afterlife. Thus the Egyptian statue of Darius the Great declares in hieroglyphs that the king is "the perfect god who rejoices in maat," along with Persian cuneiform expressing his accustomed veneration of Ahura Mazda.
The struggle of maat versus isfet (evil and untruth) is expressed via the myth of Osiris, the ancient god-king and lifeforce of the land, who was killed by his brother and usurper Set, god of chaos. In the late period, Set was portrayed negatively though still worshipped in certain religious centers. He was said to have cut Osiris' body into 42 pieces and scattered them around the country, their landing places corresponding with the 42 nomes. Thus the resurrection of Osiris by his wife Isis (earlier regarded as the wife of the sky god Horus, now reidentified as his mother) is tied to the unification of Egypt. Horus became the next king, and Isis' association with the throne (the literal meaning of her name, is.t) may mean that the throne was metaphorically regarded as the king's mother.
Although the pharaoh retained a kind of divine status (to my knowledge, it is only in Egyptian-language documents that the Achaemenids claimed divinity rather than mere divine favor) his role as intercessor between gods and humanity became less important as direct personal devotions on the part of commoners became more so. The gods were now seen as less distant, more involved in day-to-day human affairs, and individuals sought out divine favor on their own. Concurrent is the spread of funerary texts like the Book of the Dead among commoners to ensure that they, like the king, would be protected and guided in the afterlife.
Clothing
The Egyptian at Naqš-e Rostam is clad simply in an ankle-length tunic with long fitted sleeves and a keyhole neckline, worn unbelted (in my estimation it would probably be bloused over a belt for combat, like the ancient Gaels, who wore a similar tunic). Unfortunately, the Persepolis relief is badly damaged, showing only the Egyptians' lower legs, though they also wear garments with a long hem; a wide embroidered border (or perhaps a fringe) is also visible. The sculpture, or at least the quality and lighting of the photo, is too indistinct even to tell what kind of footwear they have. As for women's clothing, Fashion-Era has a guide on wrapping a shawl-type dress Egyptian-style from a rectangular length of fabric. Ancient Egypt was famed for its production of linen and this is therefore an even more appropriate fabric here than for peoples from elsewhere in the empire, but wool is also fine. Cotton was not yet grown in Egypt and would have to be regarded as an imported luxury good from India.
Weapons
Herodotus lists Egyptian arms as "woven helmets," "hollow shields with broad rims, and spears for sea-warfare, and great battle-axes. Most of them wore cuirasses and carried long swords (machairas)."
The woven helmets may have very ancient precedent. Headgear resembling woven rope helmets are said to be worn in paintings in the tomb of Ramses III. However it's equally true that over the centuries between then and the Graeco-Persian wars there is likely to have been changes in style and technology.
The Cyropaedia (VI.2 and VII.1) describes Egyptian shields as very large, covering the body down to the feet, being pushed forward with one shoulder, and used with very large spears. New Kingdom Egyptian troops had often been portrayed carrying shields with flat bottoms, arched tops and blotchy patterns perhaps indicating that they were covered in hair-on animal hide, and these late period shields are likely an enlargement of those. If equipped with a telamon they could be used in conjunction with large spears in the same manner as early Mycenaean warriors.
Swords were quite long by 5th century standards, straight, made of iron and with U-shaped pommels. A few fragments may be seen here. If Persian art is to be trusted, the Egyptians and many other peoples wore long sword scabbards on slings like rifles, rather than belts or baldrics.
Egyptian cuirasses are believed to have been made of linen; Herodotus mentions that Amasis sent such a one to a temple of Athena on Rhodes. Although you can still find a lot of sources claiming that linen armor was glued, the people whom I trust most on this (such as Dan Howard, author of Bronze Age Military Equipment) have said unequivocally that linen armor should be quilted, not glued.
A footnote: Yes, it really is pure coincidence that the "Peoples of the empire" series reached Egypt just as Egypt is dominating international news. It's things like this that are why I'm not 100 percent atheist.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Update: Axes
While you're at Hun Archery, you might also want to check out one of their range of bronze Scythian axes.
Friday, May 18, 2012
— with an ax!
The use of battleaxes is mostly attributed to the Scythians (Herodotus VII.64), although Persians may have used them as well. At Persepolis Darius the Great's weapon carrier is seen with an ornate axe or warhammer; other peoples are shown carrying axes as tribute. The Greek transcription of the Scythian name is sagaris (pl. sagarides).
The sagaris could have an iron or bronze head. It was small in profile and similar to a tomahawk, although the edge sometimes flared dramatically. It typically had a long back spike. An iron example may be seen here (item 5273 about three-fourths of the way down). It is 7.25 inches (18.4cm) long and the spike is curled. Other examples exist where the blade is double-edged or the back resembles a multi-pronged warhammer. An unusual find, replicated here, has an extraordinarily broad blade and back spike shaped like a griffin head. Judging by period art, the haft was slim, straight and about a foot and a half to two feet long (46-61cm). It was probably worn with the haft tucked into the belt.
Sourcing: Manning Imperial's medium and small Amazon axe heads are probably the best-looking available, but you have to make your own haft. Pending documentation for its use in the Achaemenid period, the Luristan type is not acceptable. A cheaper (albeit rather bulky) option, Cold Steel's "Spike Hawk," looks like it should be acceptable once the black coating is sanded off.
I don't know enough about the physics of stage combat with an axe to make any recommendations in that area. Most sparring axes seem to be made of foam rubber or other bulky nonmetallic materials. The few metal ones I've seen don't look right for our period either.
Next up: Now we all have metal skin.
The sagaris could have an iron or bronze head. It was small in profile and similar to a tomahawk, although the edge sometimes flared dramatically. It typically had a long back spike. An iron example may be seen here (item 5273 about three-fourths of the way down). It is 7.25 inches (18.4cm) long and the spike is curled. Other examples exist where the blade is double-edged or the back resembles a multi-pronged warhammer. An unusual find, replicated here, has an extraordinarily broad blade and back spike shaped like a griffin head. Judging by period art, the haft was slim, straight and about a foot and a half to two feet long (46-61cm). It was probably worn with the haft tucked into the belt.
Sourcing: Manning Imperial's medium and small Amazon axe heads are probably the best-looking available, but you have to make your own haft. Pending documentation for its use in the Achaemenid period, the Luristan type is not acceptable. A cheaper (albeit rather bulky) option, Cold Steel's "Spike Hawk," looks like it should be acceptable once the black coating is sanded off.
I don't know enough about the physics of stage combat with an axe to make any recommendations in that area. Most sparring axes seem to be made of foam rubber or other bulky nonmetallic materials. The few metal ones I've seen don't look right for our period either.
Next up: Now we all have metal skin.
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